Zug Sebastian

Current research
Thesis Title : Moral and interests. Water supply in peri-urban Khartoum

Summary
In my PhD project I reconstruct water supply in a peri-urban neighbourhood in Khartoum. Water is delivered by a malfunctioning water network, informal water vendors and – to satisfy basic needs of all – redistributed among neighbours for free. In its ‘biography’, water is embedded into different contexts, which are never completely based on market mechanisms, but are always – to more or less degree – related to motives which are not based on economic profit. The different constellations in which water is transferred are analysed in the framework of Bourdieu’s ‘Theory of Practice’ which is confronted with people’s ethics as an antipode to Bourdieu’s focus on power and capital exchange.

Key Words
the gift of water, altruism, water solidarity, economy of symbolic goods, political ecology of water, infrastructure failure, appropriation of the network, Bourdieu, Sudan, Khartoum